April 2007

Living in the countryside of Northern California when I was about 12, going through some of the things my parents had stuffed into my large bedroom closet because their own large bedroom closet was stuffed to overflowing, I discovered a boxed set of 5 Vonnegut books from the 70s - my dad’s books. The covers were gaudy comic-book like things with lurid female imagery and so I asked my dad about them. His response was that they were “books for adults,” they had “complex themes,” and I “probably wouldn’t like them.” Of course that set my mind’s course upon immediately ripping through them all. I quickly tossed whatever Dragonlance novel I was reading at the time and read straight through “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Breakfast of Champions.”

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Actually the title is “Strange English Language” a poem by Dr. Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946).

Great poem on the screwed up-ness of how english words are pronounced. heh, it made me chuckle so I thought I would share it with a wider audience.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.

Go read it and enjoy.

At 8,000 euros I’m going to have to call this one “unnecessary.”

Try going to the Seattle Library on a rainy or a cold day and counting the number of homeless people taking refuge there. This points to a huge problem. These people need help beyond finding temporary shelter in our public structures. In Seattle, our new library cost more than $165 million and yet we have not found a better way to take care of our mentally ill and chronically homeless populations than to let them inside in the morning, monitor them for behavioral issues, and then clear them every night.

Former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library system, Chip Ward, has written an outstanding piece called “How The Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel” (found via a short pointer piece at LibraryJournal.com) for the Atlantic Free Press, in a column called Hard Truths for Hard Times. This is a fascinating read and it touches on some real loopholes and ineffectiveness in our policies to deal with the mentally ill. I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to read it.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

The library wrestles with where to draw the line on odor. The law is unclear. An aggressive patron in New Jersey successfully sued a public library for banning him because of his body odor. That decision has had a chilling effect on public libraries ever since. When library users complain about the odor of transients, librarians usually respond that there isn’t much they can do about it. Lately, libraries are learning to write policies on odor that are more specific and so can be defended in court, but such rules are still hard to enforce because smell is such a subjective thing — and humiliating someone by telling him he stinks is an awkward experience that librarians prefer to avoid. None of this was covered in library school.

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it’s downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.

What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.

Jay Rubin on the difficulty of translating gruesome passages

Matthew Baldwin’s proposal for how to keep dumb-asses off of the internet

Watching “Novel Reflections on the American Dream” (link to trailer | website), a new documentary on PBS, is an illuminating two hour experience which steps through 7 great American novels and how they’ve each confronted the subject of American idealism and pushed our perceptions of what it means to be “self-made.” Delving into issues of class, racism, feminism, politics, and soul-searching, this documentary is not to be missed.

I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve only read 2 of these books, “Seize the Day” and “The Great Gatsby.” I definitely intend to get to “The Grapes of Wrath” one of these days. Any others I shouldn’t miss?

1. 

“Sister Carrie,” Theodore Dreiser

2. 

“The House of Mirth,” Edith Wharton

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Do yourself a favor and grab tickets for you and a friend to go check out this show at the Northwest Film Forum. It’s only playing this weekend so you’ve got to go tonight or tomorrow. You get “The Puget News guarantee” that you’ll leave with a warm fuzzy feeling.

The show is spearheaded by Drs. Ink and Owning (Rachel Kessler and Sierra Nelson of the Typing Explosion), two scientists exploring the collective answers to scientific questionnaires the audience has filled out on their way in to the theatre. Through the use of music, dance, film, sweets, and live science, the doctors instruct and celebrate our most intimate foibles. While the show had many rough elements, record players being bumped, missing data for one of the demonstrations, and the continuous movement of the overhead projectors, the whimsy and bubbly personalities of the cast more than make up for any temporary awkwardness. The show is disarmingly human and that’s the whole point.

I really don’t want to give away all the pleasant bits in the show, just know that you’ll be doing vocalizations and watching man-dancers. Steel yourself.

Oh, and Rachel, a bunch of us who went out drinking afterwards really wanted to hear you belt out one of those tunes. You’ve got a beautiful and strong voice. Turn it loose!

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